During
Wednesday’s debate in the House of Commons on the phone hacking
scandal, several Conservative members of Parliament expressed concern
that the issue was a distraction from far more important issues — among
them,
a famine in Somalia.

Peter Lilley, for
instance,
said: “I welcome the recall of Parliament. I am only sorry that we
are not being recalled to discuss the problems of the eurozone, the
slowdown in the world economy in the face of higher energy prices, and
the famine in east Africa.”

On Thursday, that idea
was expressed clearly, and controversially, on the pages of Rupert
Murdoch’s
Times of London, in the form of an editorial cartoon with the
headline “Priorities.” The cartoon showed a starving Somali child
holding his distended stomach and saying, “I’ve had a bellyful of
phone-hacking.”

Katharine Viner, an
editor at The Guardian, posted a
snapshot of the cartoon online and asked: “What do people think of
this cartoon in the Times?”

Earlier this week,
another Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Wall Street Journal
ran a combative editorial saying that news organizations not owned
by News Corporation were reporting so heavily on the hacking scandal
purely to damage a rival. The Journal’s opinion editors complained about
“the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics,”
adding, “The Schadenfreude is so thick you can’t cut it with a
chainsaw.”

During
his testimony to a parliamentary committee in London on Tuesday, Mr.
Murdoch himself made a similar charge. When asked whom he blamed for the
scandal, he replied: “A lot of people had different agendas, I think, in
trying to build this hysteria. All our competitors in this country
formally announced a consortium to try and stop us. They caught us with
dirty hands and they built the hysteria around it.”

The defenses of the
phone hacking at The News of the World, which has been closed, came on
the editorial pages of the most respected newspapers in Mr. Murdoch’s
media empire.

In 2007, when Mr.
Murdoch moved to buy The Journal, Ken Auletta of The New Yorker
reported that part of the negotiation “focused on whether Murdoch
could be trusted to keep his distance from news coverage, and what kind
of independent board could assure this.” To assuage the fears of the
family that owned the newspaper, Mr. Murdoch “said that he would be
willing to establish an independent board to assure that editors were
free from his whims.”

As Mr. Auletta
explained, Mr. Murdoch offered to set up “a board like the one he had
established for The Times of London and The Sunday Times, where of the
fifteen members only seven have no ties to News Corp., and where he can
theoretically hire or fire the editor only with the assent of the board.
In London, The Times board rarely meets, and is reliant for much of its
information on Murdoch.”

The composition of that
board, known as a “special
committee,” was eventually outlined in detail as part of News
Corporation’s ultimately successful bid to buy Dow Jones, the publisher
of The Journal.

Last week,
Dow Jones reported that the special committee, “formed to monitor
editorial integrity and independence at The Wall Street Journal and Dow
Jones Newswires” in 2007, had issued a statement clearing the American
news organization of any connection to the hacking scandal.

The Dow Jones report
continued:

The statement of the
committee, which is composed of independent journalism professionals,
came a few hours after Les Hinton, Dow Jones’s chief executive officer,
resigned. Hinton had been executive chairman of News International, the
U.K. unit responsible for the News of the World newspaper at the center
of the hacking allegations.

Of the hacking scandal,
the committee said, “Such matters are deeply concerning to us,
suggesting as they do a serious default of basic journalistic standards
in certain units of News Corp.”

The committee added: “To
date, nothing has come to our attention that causes us to believe that
today’s resignation of Les Hinton as publisher of The Wall Street
Journal is [in] any way related to activities at The Wall Street Journal
or Dow Jones or that any of the London offenses or anything like them
have taken place at Dow Jones. We will continue to monitor the situation
closely.”

The committee has
quarterly meetings. The members, each paid $100,000 a year by the
company, are Thomas J. Bray, former editorial page editor of the Detroit
News; Louis Boccardi, former chief executive of the Associated Press;
Jack Fuller, retired president of Tribune Publishing Co.; Nicholas
Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology; and Susan M. Phillips, dean of the George Washington
University School of Business.

In 2007, Mr. Auletta
suggested that Mr. Murdoch “seems to value even a trophy property like
The Times of London less for its prestige than for its influence — its
power to help sway elections, to promote his political ideas, and to
protect his corporate interests.”

Minutes after Mr.
Murdoch concluded his appearance before the parliamentary committee in
London on Tuesday, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York
University,
commented on Twitter: “News Corp. isn’t a news company at all, but a
global media empire that employs its newspapers (and in the U.S., Fox
News) as a lobbying arm.”